The latest release of the AFI Catalog sees the completion of records for the year 1972. As well as some 250 new records for 1972, the new release includes corrections and additions for existing records, making for a total of more than 48,000 records in all. The Catalog now offers a continuous history of American cinema from 1893 to 1972, and new records for the 1970s will continue to be added in forthcoming releases.

1972 was a seminal year for American film, with the release of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, along with a number of early films by Coppola's contemporaries from this new generation of filmmakers:

Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* but Were Afraid to Ask and Play it Again,

Sam Robert Altman's images

Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?

John Boorman's Deliverance

Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha

Michael Ritchie's The Candidate

The older generation of directors from the Classic Hollywood era were also still very active: this year saw the release of:

Billy Wilder's romantic comedy Avanti!,

Hitchcock's penultimate film Frenzy,

John Huston's western The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Sleuth.

Other notable films of the year include The Poseidon Adventure, Sam Peckinpah's notorious Straw Dogs, and the ecological science fiction film Silent Running.

As well as plot summaries, notes and source citations, all records include full production credits, details of cast and music, and indexing by both subject and genre. The 1972 records include a number of films indexed as 'Horror' (Dr Phibes Rises Again, Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left), 'Blaxploitation' (Super Fly, Shaft's Big Score!) or even both (Blacula). Research these and other films at http://afi.chadwyck.com.